Restoring Original Images

Whether you choose Local mode to store image backups on your server, or Cloud mode to store image backups on the EWWW IO API servers, there may come a time when you find yourself needing to restore some images from the EWWW IO backups. So, how do you access those?

Restore image uploads from the Media Library

The most commonly used method is to switch the Media Library to List mode. In the top-left corner of the Media Library, there are two buttons that let you toggle between List and Grid modes. Once you've switched to List mode, you will find Restore links for any image that has an image backup available.

Restore individual image files

Secondly, on the EWWW IO Tools page, there is a button to Show Optimized Images. From the list of optimized images, you can restore individual thumbnails & resizes as well as the originals, so it can be useful if you only want to restore a couple specific image files.

Restore All Images

Before you ever even attempt this, make sure it's the actual images that are the problem. A plugin conflict with the EWWW IO lazy load can play all sorts of tricks on your images. So it's a good idea to double-check with our support folks to make sure a full restore is going to be helpful.

Then, before you do anything else, take a fresh backup of your site. It might seem odd, but it never hurts to have an extra backup in case things don't go as expected with the restore process.

Once you've ruled out plugin conflicts AND performed a full site backup, you can run the bulk restore tool from Tools->EWWW Image Optimizer. The bulk restore and several other tools are available via WP-CLI also, which is a great option to avoid issues with PHP timeouts and the like.

Manually accessing image backups

If you have Cloud-based backups, you can access your optimization history at https://history.exactlywww.com/ where you'll also find restore links for any images processed in the last 30 days.

Local backups are stored in the wp-content/ewww/ folder, or in uploads/ewww/ if the wp-content/ folder isn't writable. Any images that are optimized outside of wp-content/ will have their backups stored in ../ewww/root/